# Re-designing cities with conditional adversarial networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.04013 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04013/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Photographic Image Synthesis with Cascaded Refinement Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09405/) (2017)
- [Generating Images with Perceptual Similarity Metrics based on Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02644/) (2016)
- [Generative Image Modeling using Style and Structure Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05631/) (2016)
- [Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12296/) (2019)
- [Visualizing the Consequences of Climate Change Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03709/) (2019)
- [City-GAN: Learning architectural styles using a custom Conditional GAN architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05280/) (2019)
- [FaceLift: A transparent deep learning framework to beautify urban scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05961/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a conditional generative adversarial network to redesign a street-level image of urban scenes by generating 1) an urban intervention policy, 2) an attention map that localises where intervention is needed, 3) a high-resolution street-level image (1024 X 1024 or 1536 X1536) after implementing the intervention. We also introduce a new dataset that comprises aligned street-level images of before and after urban interventions from real-life scenarios that make this research possible. The introduced method has been trained on different ranges of urban interventions applied to realistic images. The trained model shows strong performance in re-modelling cities, outperforming existing methods that apply image-to-image translation in other domains that is computed in a single GPU. This research opens the door for machine intelligence to play a role in re-thinking and re-designing the different attributes of cities based on adversarial learning, going beyond the mainstream of facial landmarks manipulation or image synthesis from semantic segmentation.